Finding a File Descriptor Leak

Posted in Software

My current project is a control system that runs on a small embedded PC running a Linux OS. I had a problem during development where I had to open/close two serial ports alternatively because they shared an interrupt. Doing this suddenly caused the software to crash after running for a few minutes. The problem turned out to be that I was leaking file descriptors!

I wrote a simple shell script that prints the the total file descriptors open on the serial ports. This helped me make sure my bug fix worked correctly.

#!/bin/sh
 
TIME=1
 
while [ 1 -eq 1 ]; do
    clear
    lsof | awk '''
BEGIN { ttyS0 = ttyS1 = ttyS3 = ttyS4 = 0; }
/\/dev\/ttyS4/ { ttyS4++; }
/\/dev\/ttyS3/ { ttyS3++; }
/\/dev\/ttyS0/ { ttyS0++; }
/\/dev\/ttyS1/ { ttyS1++; }
END {
    print " Descriptor    Counter ";
    print " ttyS4       " ttyS4;
    print " ttyS3       " ttyS3;
    print " ttyS1       " ttyS1;
    print " ttyS0       " ttyS0;
}
'''
    sleep $TIME
done

In the end I manually control the serial port using the sys module instead of using pySerial. I still have no idea why pyserial started leaking resources.